Abstract
The term “epistemic shifts” refers to a widely recognized phenomenon that knowledge ascribers would ascribe different epistemic statuses to the same belief under different internal/external conditions. Mainstream theories explaining shifts (including contextualism, contrastivism, and intellectual invariantism) can all be assimilated into a probabilistic framework, according to which the epistemic status of a belief P can be at least partially evaluated in terms of the strength of the link between this belief and its normal truth-maker, namely, a P-corresponding fact, and the strength of this link can be further probabilistically measured in terms of the knowledge-undermining force of an “abnormal” truth-maker of P, namely, a P-inducing fact which itself is not a P-corresponding fact simpliciter. I will further claim that by accepting my framework, a theorist of shifts has to tolerate a pluralist view of the etiology of shifts on the philosophical level, and mainstream theories explaining shifts are flawed in the sense that they all attempt to exaggerate one single and particular factor underpinning shifts by ignoring others.
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Notes
Nonetheless, some may criticize my position by contending that the enumeration of all positive events is actually more psychologically overburdening than just using a negative formulation. But these critics have misunderstood my point. Surely we do always use negations in ordinary discourses for the sake of brevity, but in these cases, we may not attribute probability values to these formulations. Attributions of probability require the minimal stability of the target event, and only positive formulations can afford this.
Surely to rephrase “salient” in terms of “deserving noticing” is my idea, not Cohen’s. But such translation is proper in the sense that it will not result in changes of the truth conditions of those “salient”-containing sentences. Just think about Cohen’s (1999, p. 61) own following sentence:
S-1: The case of John and Mary, it is the importance of the Chicago meeting that makes the chance of error salient (italicized by the author).
And there is no reason to believe that truth conditions of S-2 (which is my translation of S-1) is different from those of S-1:
S-2: The case of John and Mary, it is the importance of the Chicago meeting that makes the chance of error deserve noticing.
Hence, it is fairly reasonable to assume that “deserving noticing” is synonymous to “salient”.
Surely in some cases, from the perspective of attributors, how to attribute a belief to the relevant subject may be a complicated issue. But in most typical epistemological vignettes, the vignette builder will directly tell the audience that the very subject has the target belief (although such a builder will still leave the attribution of knowledge to the target belief as an open question to the readers). For instance, in the first vignette of the Gettier case (Gettier 1963), the belief that “Whoever will get the job has ten coins in their pocket.” has to be attributed to the subject, namely, Smith, simply because this is exactly what required by the vignette itself. Hence, at least in these vignettes, the satisfaction of rule (ii) is guaranteed.
This problem can be generalized as a problem on how to universally handle different types of stakes considered in different domains. My worry is that this problem cannot be solved even by Schroeder’s (2012) stake-based model, namely, the most sophisticated refinement of Stanley’s model (within my knowledge). The key idea of Schroeder’s model is as follows (ibid., p. 280):
S’s epistemic reasons to believe p are at least as good as S’s epistemic reasons to believe ~p just in case:
$$ {\mathrm{Ev}}_{\mathrm{p}}+\mathrm{Err}2+\mathrm{Err}{1}_{\sim \mathrm{p}}>{\mathrm{Ev}}_{\sim}\mathrm{p}+\mathrm{Err}2+\mathrm{Err}{1}_{\mathrm{p}} $$(11)The meaning of this formula is that the sum of the strength of the evidence for believing p and the cost of making “type-2 error” and the cost of making the “type-1 error concerning ~p” cannot be exceeded by the sum of the strength of the evidence for believing ~p and the cost of making “type-2 error” and the cost of making the “type-1 error concerning p” (Here “type-1” error means the mistakes of making something false as true, and vice versa, and the “type-2” error means the mistakes of neglecting the relevant beliefs themselves.).
However, formula (11) simply lacks a minimal integration of dimensions: The dimension for measuring the weight of evidence is patently different from that for measuring the cost of making errors, and to put them on the same page is as unmanageable as computing the sum of, say, 3 mi of railways and 5 gal of Coca-Cola. In this sense, a formula (11)-based theory cannot handle different types of stakes in a universal way.
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Acknowledgments
This research is sponsored by the National Foundation of Social Sciences of China (No. 15ZDB020) and the Foundation of Philosophy and Social Science of the Ministry of Education of China (No. 19JZD010).
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Xu, Y. A Probabilistic Framework for Formalizing Epistemic Shifts. Acta Anal 36, 229–247 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-020-00442-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-020-00442-0